[Foss4g2009] WMS Performance Shootout at FOSS4G 2009

[Paul Ramsey]

Sydney, Australia. 5 October 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

GeoServer, MapServer, and ArcGIS Server will be competing for the
title of "Fastest Web Map Server (WMS)" at the FOSS4G 2009 conference
at the end of October. The Web Mapping Performance Shoot-out compares
Web Map Servers in a variety of real world use cases.

This third installment of the FOSS4G shoot-out looks to be even more
exciting with the introduction of a team from ESRI. "ESRI supports
interoperability with the OSGeo and open source community" says Satish
Sankaran, PhD., ESRI Product Manager for Interoperability, " and, as
such, are happy to participate in the OSGEO demonstration-'shootout'
at FOSS4G. We are also participating in the OGC's Climate Change
Integration Plugfest at FOSS4G, and with our colleagues from 52North
who will be in the technical exhibits area."

The performance shoot-out will see GeoServer, MapServer, and ArcGIS
Server compared in terms of how long they take to generate a map
image, from a common set of spatial data. The data formats used will
be shapefile, geotiff, ECW, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, and
SDE on Oracle. Benchmarking scripts will be executed on a common
platform running Red Hat Linux.

GeoServer will be represented by Andrea Aime (OpenGeo) and Simone
Giannecchini (GeoSolutions). "With the rapid expansion of GeoServer's
capabilities each year, these benchmarking exercises are an excellent
forum for us to test it in new and challenging ways," said Chris
Holmes, Managing Director of OpenGeo and founder of the GeoServer
project.

One of the most important 'rules of engagement' for each Web server
team is that all parties must contribute any changes that they make to
their software for this exercise, back to their community. As
explained by Steve Lime, founder of Mapserver, "Past benchmarking
presentations have brought about many improvements in the servers,
such as MapServer's improvements in large shapefile indexing, raster
read optimization, and labeling placement. The MapServer Project
Steering Committee is excited to help with this presentation again."
MapServer will be represented by Daniel Morissette (Mapgears), Jeff
McKenna (Gateway Geomatics), and Frank Warmerdam.

For more information about the Web mapping performance shootout, see
the wiki at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Benchmarking_2009, or follow
along discussions in the benchmarking mailing list at:
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/benchmarking.

== About FOSS4G ==

FOSS4G is the international Free and Open Source Software for
Geospatial conference, which comes to Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October
2009. FOSS4G offers presentations, workshops, demos, an install-fest,
and a code sprint. It is presented by the world's best Developers,
Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals and includes the
latest geospatial applications, standards, government programs,
business processes and case studies. Topics include mobile platforms,
location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing,
development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data,
Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services,
Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more.

== Upcoming milestones ==

20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

== Media Sponsors ==

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/
SlashGeo: http://slashgeo.org

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising
Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at:
http://2009.foss4g.org/about_us/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and
Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft
tel +61-2-8570-5050   c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m